


Socializing the Apocalypse Gremlin

by KnightNight7203



Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Gen, I need more Allison and Five interactions please and thank you, probably some kind of dysphoria too, some level of disordered eating
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-09-06
Updated: 2020-10-12
Packaged: 2021-03-06 16:48:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 14,638
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26312155
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KnightNight7203/pseuds/KnightNight7203
Summary: When Allison calls a family meeting that night—sans Five, of course, not that he’d show anyway—she’s pretty confident that they’ll all be there. She smiles fondly at them and gets right down to business.“Unfortunately, I think it’s time,” she says. “We are going to have to stage an intervention.”In which Five can’t human, Allison can’t take it anymore, and the others are scared enough of both of them to at least try and help things along.
Comments: 43
Kudos: 337





	1. Chapter 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I mean, I’m sure somebody has already written this, but what can you do?  
>   
> Idk, just pretend the Sparrow Academy isn’t a thing, or that they’ve fixed it already.  
>   
> 

Sometimes he catches a glimpse of his reflection in the mirror and almost shits himself.

Not literally. That’s disgusting. But like—spiritually. Something is very wrong, and he knows exactly what, but he doesn’t know how to go about handling it. Emotions—they’re not quite his thing, you know? He has no idea how to reach that magical state of acceptance, or transcendence, or whatever else Klaus rambles about when he gets going on his hippie nonsense designed specifically to excuse himself from the consequences of whatever he’s done now—and raise the blood pressure of everyone else in the room.

No, he just knows how to get really, really angry.

(Not that Klaus is any good at emotions either, to be perfectly clear. None of them are good at anything he is not—except perhaps Vanya and her violin.)

(And yet, the point still stands.)

In light of all that, he does something that can probably be specifically defined as Not Handling It instead: he takes a spiked Decorative Wall Weapon that Reginald (or, more realistically, Grace) mounted in the hall downstairs at some point in the past, and carefully smashes in every reflective surface in his room. Yes, including the window. Bugs are good sources of protein, after all, and after half a century in a literal wasteland, he doesn’t actually feel temperature anymore unless his toes are about to fall right off.

He kicks most of the glass out of the way, but if he misses a piece and it gets stuck in the fleshy underside of his foot later, well, it’s no skin off his back. That’s what he gets for taking his shoes off. He knows better. Anything could happen, at any time, and you have to be ready.

He’s becoming so damn _soft_ in this place.

To avoid thinking about it all, he writes on his walls—equations, mostly, especially now that he has some new super-avenues to explore. But there are also cryptic warnings to himself, ones he doesn’t necessarily remember the meaning of in the morning. For a while he was using Sharpie—something about the pungent smell made him feel better than he felt when he wasn’t using Sharpie—but he must have misplaced those, because they were all gone when he woke up one day after a brief, much-needed nap.

So now he uses a pack of Crayola markers that he found in a backpack sitting on the sidewalk outside. His favorite is purple, so he uses that one up first. Yellow is interesting, because it’s a little hard to see, but allows for a nice layering effect that basically gives him twice as much space. The only one he refuses to use is orange. He doesn’t know why, but it makes him think of Diego.

He’s not fighting with Diego specifically—at least not right this second—but he’s sure there will come a time in the future when he’ll be grateful not to have a color that reminds him of Number Two lurking above his bed while he’s trying to sleep. As a seasoned time-traveler, he’s learned to appreciate wisdom like this when it strikes him.

The orange goes straight in the dumpster. It might accidentally hit Luther’s head, protruding out his own window for an unspecified reason, on the way down.

* * *

They all walk past his door when he’s in here, at least several times a day—because they’re afraid he’s disappeared, he thinks, or maybe because they’re afraid he’s still just rattling around.

Okay, so he’s not _entirely_ sure why they care, or how they’d prefer he spend his time. But he can always tell when it’s Allison, because she’s the only one whose heels click on the floor the whole way down the hall. (Well, sometimes Klaus wears heels, too. But he staggers like a drunk even when he’s sober, so the very put-together person loitering out there right now definitely isn’t him.)

He doesn’t necessarily like when it’s Allison. She doesn’t respond quite the same way to his best glares as the rest of them.

“Five?” she calls politely, and he means to tell her to go bother someone else. He’s sure there’s a sibling around doing something stupid that she can bully out of a bad idea, or at least bully out of the house for a while. But he’s staring down a suspicious x and forgets to reply, and so she pushes the door open and comes right in.

She glances around and rolls her eyes—at the writing on the walls, he presumes, because she has strongly implied on several occasions now that she’s not into that kind of thing. Then she staggers, makes a horrible face, and abruptly stops being so polite.

“Holy— What the _fuck_ are you doing in here?”

He turns to her, eyebrow arched primly because it’s funny and he can. “Pardon?”

“Oh my god.” Her eyes are scrunched, and she might actually be gagging. Suddenly, he’s genuinely concerned—that doesn’t seem healthy at all. “Five, what—have you—what is that _smell?_ ”

Hmm. That’s weird—he doesn’t really smell anything at all.

“Is it me?” he asks curiously as she gasps for a breath. He vaguely remembers reading somewhere that you become immune to your own stink at some point, but he’s fairly sure he showered … sometime since he was last asleep. This is a fresh uniform, at least. And anyway, he definitely hasn’t gotten to that horrifying part of puberty (again), yet.

As soon as that thought crosses his mind, he becomes unfathomably angry once more. He glowers.

“Did you need something, or did you just come up here to insult me?” he demands before she can answer his last question. Then he caps his marker and stares at her, because he can’t be expected to solve equations while someone is invading his space like this. It’s positively inhumane.

“It’s not you,” she manages, although, to her credit, she doesn’t seem 100 percent sure. She glances around for a few seconds, investigating. Then her eyes land on something on the other side of her room, and her expression becomes several orders of magnitude more horrified.

He follows her gaze to … okay, it’s a slightly nasty pile of old dishes.

Well. More than slightly. It’s actually really, really gross.

“Five, what is that?” she asks.

Her voice is scarily calm all of a sudden, and he gets the distinct feeling that there might not be a correct answer here. In moments like these, he tends to feel a brief, confusing flash of sympathy for Claire. But he makes an attempt anyway: “Dishes?”

“That’s not _dishes_ ,” she says, looking back and forth between him and the food like he’s gone and grown a second head. “That’s—that’s the rotting remains of every single meal we’ve brought up to you for, like, the past two weeks.”

She seems upset now, but he doesn’t quite get it. Sure, it’s disgusting, but it’s not in her space—and he honestly hadn’t even noticed until she barged in and pointed it out. Maybe it’s the fact that he’s wasting food, which he’d thought was a huge deal at one point for obvious reasons—but his siblings all throw away tons of scraps from every single meal, Allison included. He _knows_ , because he’s not an idiot, that it’s painfully easy to just … go get some more.

“So?”

She gives a disbelieving little laugh, and ends up gagging on that, too. It really is funny—he still can’t smell it at all. “ _So,_ what have you been _eating_?”

He thinks it over. She might have a fraction of a point here, actually, although he’s obviously been eating when he needs to—popping down to the kitchen for a slice of toast once everyone’s in bed, or, one time, borrowing Vanya’s phone without permission to order pizza by typing instructions into a little form with his thumbs (though he didn’t end up liking that, much). He isn’t necessarily avoiding family meals, or the plates his siblings leave for him, on purpose—he’s just busy. But he does get busy quite a lot, and he never stopped to consider that he might be hurting their feelings, or making them worry …

It’s exponentially more draining than he expected, this having to consider the way five other people are going to interpret all of his actions 24/7. It’s obviously better than the alternative, but he’s finding, as conversations like these arise, that he is very much not a fan.

“I had a donut yesterday,” he eventually volunteers. He doesn’t tell her how he got it—she might not like the answer. (It was thievery. He stole it. And he’s learned that Allison, despite what she got up to as a child, is currently not a big proponent of stealing.)

“And today?” she says. “It’s almost five-thirty—you should have eaten, like, at least two meals by now.”

“Coffee,” he grunts, tapping his marker impatiently against his thigh. He’s definitely not interested in this conversation anymore, and he’s really hoping she’ll pick up on that fact. Here’s the thing: if he’s hungry, he’ll eat. He’s been taking care of himself for more than forty-five years; he certainly doesn’t need her to step in and do it for him.

Allison sighs. “Will you come eat something for me now?” she asks, bending down to start gathering some of the worst plates. He wants to tell her that he’ll clean it now that he’s noticed it, because it’s his mess—but she’s annoying him, being all condescending, and so he doesn’t.

“No,” he says, “because I’m doing something important.” Obviously.

“Oh, clearly,” she snarks, literally dropping a plate back onto the ground so she has a free hand to wave him over sarcastically.

He spares a brief second to think about how this all must look from her perspective—the gaping window, perpetually raw fingernails, a crusted, bloody white sock on one foot because he ran out of black ones and doesn’t quite recall how to do laundry. He has “DON’T FALL ASLEEP” scrawled in all capital letters beside his headboard (though he can’t really remember why), and then there’s the whole rotting food thing. He actually dozed off against the wall earlier in the morning—just for a few seconds, though—and he probably has some scribbles smudged across his cheek as a result. It’s admittedly not exactly how he typically likes to represent himself—even when it was just Dolores around, he used to make at least a bit more of an effort.

He pushes it all away. It’s fine. If he could just _get this equation_ , he could reverse it all and literally turn back the clock—to before Mirrorgate, even—so this conversation never happens. Now, sure, that’s a lot of power for someone to have—he of all people probably doesn’t deserve it. But once he has it firmly in his grasp—that’s when he’ll decide whether or not it’s ethical to use.

That sounds about right.

Allison rolls her eyes at something she sees on his face, and scoops up the plate again. Something green and slimy has rolled onto the floor, but she doesn’t dare touch that. “You really can’t smell it?” she asks, eyeing him carefully—like she might catch him lying, for some absurd reason. In all honesty, he can’t even imagine what it’s like—at first glance, there are graying pork chops, fuzzy vegetables, rancid fish, and a host of other monstrosities oozing onto his carpet.

He shakes his head, staring her down. “I’ve spent a lot of quality time with piles of decaying corpses,” he says finally. “It’s kind of the same thing—I’m probably immune.”

He turns back to his equations, leaving her to figure out if he’s joking or not.

* * *

When Allison calls a family meeting that night—sans Five, of course, not that he’d be likely to show anyway—she’s pretty confident that they’ll all be there, for several reasons.

Firstly, because none of her siblings actually have lives, and therefore can’t possibly have any plans.

Secondly, because she _strongly_ suspects that they’re all a little scared of her, and as such, are interested in staying on her good side.

Add this to the fact that she frames the whole thing as something of an emergency—which it _is_ , even if it’s somewhat different than the brand of global catastrophe they’ve been dealing with over the past however-long it’s been for everyone involved—she’s not at all surprised to see four respectably-apprehensive faces staring back at her when the clock strikes nine. She smiles fondly at them—Luther perched awkwardly on the sofa like he’s afraid he’s going to break it, Klaus lounging like some kind of diva on the cover of a bodice-ripper, Diego twirling a knife in the shadows like he doesn’t give a rat’s ass, and sweet Vanya curling into herself, just a little—and gets right down to business.

“Unfortunately, I think it’s time,” she says. “We are going to have to stage an intervention.”


	2. Interlude The First

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> God it has been such a long isolation, I’ve literally spent hours staring at the comments for the last chapter. I may have cried. Sorry for the slow update. Love you all <3

Allison takes a deep breath to steady herself, shoves aside some bottles—mostly empty—to clear space at the bar, and props up a large blank tablet against the blender. She uncaps a black Sharpie and writes a big **#1** at the top.

“Okay, team,” she begins.

Diego immediately lets out a pointed cough that sounds suspiciously like _Team Zero_ , then looks left and right, eyebrow raised innocently, as if implying someone else was responsible for the interruption _._ Allison delicately dips into the blender for an ice cube, which she throws directly at his head. She honestly expects him to redirect it elsewhere, maybe even back at her, but apparently she caught him off guard.

“So, we’re not calling ourselves that,” she says smugly at he splutters and wipes at his cheek. Luther snorts. But the attention of her siblings is such a fragile thing, and she doesn’t want to lose them before they accomplish anything, so she reigns in a cackle of her own and schools her expression into something more serious. “But back to the actual matter at hand—where do we want to start?”

“How about something simple?” Klaus suggests cheerfully. Allison blinks—Klaus is many things, including several good ones, but she certainly hadn’t expected the first idea to come from him.“Sleep. Food. Cuddles. Some of my favorite pastimes.”

On the surface, his suggestions actually makes a lot of sense (or, most of them, anyway—she’s fairly certain Five would rather stick his arm in a live bear trap than get _cuddled_ ). If Five isn’t sleeping (a suspicion she thinks has been growing in all of them for a few days now) and he’s not eating (something she proved beyond reasonable doubt earlier this afternoon), there’s not a whole lot they can do without first addressing those things.

But because they’re incapable of behaving like adults and having a civil conversation, her siblings immediately start to squabble instead of providing any genuinely constructive feedback.

“Uh, motherfucker needs a nap like Vanya needs a nuclear bomb,” Diego bursts out dramatically, ignoring Vanya’s alarmed look and Allison’s narrowed eyes. “Christ, can you imagine how powerful he’d be fully charged? We’d never get another moment’s peace—and peaceful moments are so hard to come by already.”

Luther, bless him, actually _raises his hand_. “I’ve been told—repeatedly and very bluntly, in fact—that he’s a fully competent adult more than capable of taking care of himself,” he says, with the air of someone repeating something that’s been shouted angrily at them several times over. “And so, I’m sorry, but have we considered that this whole thing is a _very bad idea?”_

“But he is in a child’s body,” Vanya counters softly. Her shoulders are still unnaturally tense, and Allison wants to grab them and (gently) pull them away from her ears by force. “If he keeps it up he’s going to hurt himself, and I think we should stop him because we care about him.”

“Allegedly,” Diego coughs. “And, that’s only if he doesn’t hurt us first.” Vanya unclenches just a fraction to nudge him with her elbow.

“Snacks and naps,” Klaus repeats, fidgeting with the clasp on his top. “Chicken soup for the soul.” Well, more or less. But even he doesn’t sound entirely sure anymore.

They’re ridiculous, all of them—and yet the more Allison thinks about it the more she starts to second guess the idea, too.

“I don’t think he feels safe enough to really sleep, even now,” she begins, then frowns. “And I’m actually pretty sure he compared the idea of food to a pile of rotting corpses earlier. Which was—charming.”

“Well, don’t we have our work cut out for us,” Klaus says, rubbing his hands together.

Then he sinks back into the cushions to stare blankly at the ceiling. Diego picks under his fingernail with the tip of a knife. Vanya and Luther sit frozen at opposite ends of the sofa with nearly identical expressions of discomfort on their faces, and Allison ponders another minute—then puts the tip of the Sharpie to the paper.

“How about this?” she asks as she writes, even though she’s not actually sure she wants any more input from the peanut gallery at this stage. “It’s not a major lifestyle change, it won’t take a lot of time, and we don’t even have to talk to him to make it happen.”

There’s silence as they all take it in, and then Diego of all people speaks up. “You know? I think it could work.”

She blows at the ink perfunctorily and smiles at him. Beside the **#1** , she’s outlined their first plan of attack: **NEW CLOTHES.**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yeah, Allison confiscated the Sharpies :)


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oof, it’s a long one, y’all.

The first time Five saw a dead body—or remembers seeing one, at least—it wasn’t buried in the rubble of an apocalyptic hellscape, and it certainly wasn’t slumped at the other end of his own gun.

No, it happened long before the world ended and he became this— _this_.

It was a Tuesday afternoon. Overcast, but not raining yet when the alarm started blaring. He was rushed for time, left one of his shoes untied and got scolded about it later. Allison forgot her mask at home, and Luther tugged Klaus’s arm a little too hard as they tore down the stairs, pulling his shoulder out of the socket. (It popped right back in, but Klaus milked that for weeks.)

Grace passed out granola bars like they were headed to the park. Reginald made them walk, or rather, run—the crime scene was only ten blocks, he sniffed, and they needed the endurance training. All in all, it was a normal day—normal for them, at any rate.

They were eleven.

When they arrived, there was blood everywhere—unrelated to the murder, apparently, but notable all the same. A propeller on a passing motorboat had hacked apart a panicking woman’s hand, and an old man had knocked his head against a sharp edge when he was pushed aside by the gathering crowd. ( _Head wounds bleed a lot_ , Ben explained, because Ben knew things like that. _He’ll probably be fine._ ) But the sole victim at the scene—eerily pale, bloated, floating face-down in the reeds along the bank of the river—was more still, more _uncanny_ than all of that. Reginald made them all take turns digging their fingers into that clammy flesh and dragging the body to shore.

Five didn’t realize—couldn’t admit—at the time, but that was actually one of the first things he ever appreciated their old man doing for them.

(To his surprise, he’d find it wouldn’t be the last.)

There were other bodies after that. Bodies with crushed ribcages or skulls from Luther’s super-powered fists, bodies thrown loose from car accidents or tossed from balconies, bodies that didn’t even look like bodies anymore after they were most unfortunately introduced to Ben. The Umbrella Academy collected around bodies. They sought them out. And in many cases, they were the ones dropping them like flies in the first place.

So by the time he got to the apocalypse, he knew—there wasn’t anything inherently scary about a body. You didn’t have to look away, or keep your distance, or, like, keep it in your sight lest it make off with your wife and eat your friends.

(Ha.)

He learned a few other things pretty quickly in the endless expanse of time that followed—but then, he was always a quick learner. For example: the smell got to you even if you ran from it, and if you don’t touch them, don’t bury them, you just might see them every time you close your eyes. No, strangling someone isn’t a particularly quick way to snuff out the light behind their eyes. If you aim carefully, you can hit the carotid, the jugular, and the windpipe all in one quick slice. A carefully-placed air bubble can be more deadly than a bullet.

He’s a master of death—probably even more so than Klaus, and _definitely_ more than Luther and Diego, the fools.

But now it’s live bodies he’s not quite sure what to do with. And, for the first time in a long time, they’re closing in from all sides. He doesn’t know how to keep them at bay, keep them near, keep them alive.

Sometimes he hates his mind, because it provides him with charming little insights like this: _It was easier when you were alone._

_Fuck you. Shut up._

He wanted this, more than anything, and it’s _good._ He’s _fine._

It’s all fine.

* * *

Five showers cold, because waiting for the water to warm up seems like a waste of time. He also showers in the dark—because flipping the light switch is a waste not only of time, but also electricity. Obviously. Sometimes—though much less frequently than he used to—he honestly does forget that electricity is even a thing. And anyway, he likes the dark. His eyes get tired looking at bright white paper and white walls and people’s shifting, complicated facial expressions under unforgiving fluorescents all hours of the day.

There are things he finds by touch alone, like the shampoo that smells like Vanya and the little stopper that makes all the water go down the drain. There are also things he does his best not to touch at all, like the slightly slimy wall and his smooth little chest and his tiny, tiny arms that probably couldn’t even pack enough of a punch to give someone a black eye anymore.

(He hasn’t actually tested that theory yet, but he’s sure one of his siblings will give him the opportunity sooner rather than later. And, hey—he’d be a pretty shitty man of science if he turned down such an occasion when it passes by.)

He’s thought distantly about it, because he thinks about a lot of things, but he suspects that if he broke the mirror in here someone would inevitably do their best to break _him._ And while he could take any of them without even breaking a sweat, he feels like it’s probably time to go a few days without pulling the old stitches in his side. He hasn’t looked, but they’re starting to feel a little … off.

And anyway, he likes the dark.

He just does.

Here’s a fun fact about the Academy: being a large building, with 42 bedrooms, there are easily a dozen bathrooms of varying shapes and sizes scattered throughout. There’s one on the first floor with a vintage toilet leftover from the 1900s, which Grace always loved even though, being a robot, she wasn’t actually able to pee. There are some with bathtubs so deep they’re almost pools, some with bathtubs that were cracked in half in the midst of long-concluded _mischief_ , and some with big open showers, like some kind of locker room, that they never used at all because they’ve always had a basic sense of dignity. Klaus set up some kind of nest in one of the uppermost ones, though for what, no one was ever brave enough to ask. One time, Allison raised tadpoles in a sink on the third floor.

A different fun fact: there were no showers in the apocalypse. The ones he used most frequently during his time at the Commission were located in extremely shitty hotels, all dingy brown and filled with suspicious hairs and stains. And yet, when blessed with the almost unimaginable selection available throughout his home here—and despite the fact that his siblings are messy, and nosy, and have no sense of privacy, respect, or healthy fear of their elders—he’s fallen back into the habit of using the one closest to their bedrooms, the one they all sort of share.

He calls it efficiency, or laziness if he’s feeling more on the nose about it—because it’s close-ish, and this way somebody else usually restocks the toilet paper and cleans up the crust on the counter. There’s a nasty voice in his head that whispers something about sentimentality, but he finds that very easy to ignore. In either case, his choice is relevant because it dictates the beginning of his still-forming Shower Routine—lock the door, then double-check the lock, then check once more just to be sure.

This in turn is relevant because, though Five likes to imagine that getting through locked doors is a gift particular to him, the reality is that all seven of them were picking their way through deadbolts and padlocks by the time they were out of diapers.

Unfortunately.

“ _Something's going DOWN that's the way it seems—_ ”

Klaus’s voice hits him at the same moment the door slams against the tiled wall, and Five honest-to-god jumps about a foot in the air. He decides to use this embarrassing reaction to his advantage on the way down, wrapping himself in the shower curtain to regain some sense of balance and simultaneously take cover.

“ _Shouldn't be the REASON why you're acting strange—_ hello?”

The light flicks on, and Five can make out Klaus’s outline frozen in the doorway through the fabric. He wishes suddenly that the curtain was about four times as thick, and maybe soundproof—God, _what_ was Klaus _singing?_

A wall. He wishes there was a wall between them, basically. Which, you know, there _was—_

“The door was locked,” he splutters, his voice not even properly angry yet because he’s still processing. It’s four o’clock in the goddamn morning. What does he have to do—

“Well yeah, but the light was off. I thought somebody just … wandered away.”

Five huffs in disbelief, crouching lower. (To attack? Certainly not to hide, because that would be ridiculous.) “From inside a locked room?”

“Yes, dear brother.” Klaus sounds snippy, or at least as close to snippy as he’s usually willing to get. “Several of us do have those skills—yourself included, now that you mention it.”

“The water is still running,” Five starts to say, but quickly gives up—there’s no reasoning with an imbecile. “You know what? Get out.” He could say please, but he’s not going to. Actually—screw politeness entirely—murder still might be in the cards.

“You know, you’re incredibly cantankerous when—“

“OUT!”

For once in his miserable life, Klaus listens. Five stays put tangled in the curtain for a moment longer, just in case, then sets about scrambling into his (old) clothes and getting the hell out of dodge.

(Yes, he’s out of clean uniforms. Yes, he has a plan to deal with it, mostly. Shut up.)

His brother has mellowed out by the time he finishes dressing and storms out of the bathroom, and is sprawled on the floor in the hall, long legs stretched out on either side of the door. But a more agreeable Klaus just means an increased willingness for conversation, and Five isn’t sure he can physically take a second more of this. He’s _this_ close to leaping right over him, or literally kicking him out of the way.

“I hate to be the one to break this to you, but it’s four o’clock in the morning,” Klaus stage-whispers, looking up at Five in a way that strongly implies he’d love to be punched in the face immediately. His inability to read a room is stunning, as usual.

“Well, congratulations. I suppose you have to master telling time like a gradeschooler before we drop the bomb that it actually doesn’t exist,” Five shoots back, maybe a little too bitterly, as a drop of icy water trickles its way under his collar and down his neck. He should have dried his hair better—he’ll have damp spots on his clothes for hours, this always happens and he never learns, but he’s always in a rush to get covered up again and go back to work.

Klaus blinks. “Yeah, but like… societal norms, et cetera,” he says, then trails off. He waves an airy hand. “Oh look, my actual point: four in the morning is a time for pajamas—or tasteful, freeing nudity! Not this stuffy little schoolboy getup. Come on, old man.” He smiles—it’s actually quite a soft smile, but in the moment it feels something like a leer. “Let loose, why don’t you.”

Five’s skin literally crawls—he’s half convinced he could look down and see it migrating right off his bones.

“Pajamas are for sleeping,” he hisses. “And I am _not_ going to sleep.”

Klaus’s face falls, almost imperceptibly, and Five takes a brief, brief moment to remind himself that other people have thoughts and feelings, and don’t necessarily like to be yelled at all the time, even when they deserve it.

“You just look so—“ Klaus pauses, and Five mentally dares him to say something anywhere close to accurate. “Uncomfortable,” is the word he finally sighs.

“I’m uncomfortable every day of my life,” Five replies—the truth, unfortunately, but spat out in such a way that makes him seem simply inconvenienced and annoyed instead of stretched so thin he’s brittle.

Klaus studies him, and his skin just keeps on crawling. “You know, I’d be willing to lend you some things,” he offers after a few moments of silence. “Or, no—gift them! I have a lot of things, I wouldn’t miss them at all—“

“No thank you,” Five says stiffly. He doesn’t want to drape himself in skirts, or fur, or leather. He actually wants to give up being corporal and perceivable altogether, fade gently out of this plane until nobody can stare at him or reach for him or corner him in hallways in the middle of the night.

_That sounds like a ghost, and if you’re a ghost, you can_ only _talk to Klaus_ , he thinks, just in case that option winds up sounding dangerously tempting somewhere down the road.

“Well, maybe if you had some different options you wouldn’t be so uncomfortable—“

“I am _uncomfortable_ because every single one of you lack healthy _boundaries_ ,” Five snaps. He’s done. He jams his toe into Klaus’s shin as he stomps past, ignoring the pained little yelp behind him. He also kicks at the baseboard for good measure, leaving a decent scuff and sending complaints up and down his leg.

“Well, you asked for it, baby bro,” he hears Klaus whisper into the air. He’s immediately on guard, expecting something childish—a tackle from behind, perhaps, or a splash of water from the detachable showerhead. But nothing comes, and he brushes his nerves away as he returns to work.

* * *

He schedules his next Food Break for two o’clock the following afternoon, because Diego, Luther, and Vanya are at work, Allison’s calls to Claire start at exactly 1:30 and usually last for around two hours, and Klaus normally sleeps until at least three. He walks halfway down the stairs before blinking in beside the fridge, because sometimes it’s nice to move around without having to worry about escape routes and hiding spots. He used to walk everywhere in the apocalypse. Sometimes he almost misses the freedom.

Four pairs of eyes blink up at him from the table when he materializes.

He stares back in shock for several seconds before fixating on the closest person—Vanya, who sits squished between Luther and some kind of oversized canvas bag. “Work?” he says dumbly.

Vanya tilts her head at him, picking idly at the strap of her bag. “It’s Sunday?”

Right. People don’t work on weekends here. Never mind that he had no idea what day it even was, or that he didn’t think to operate under the assumption that it actually mattered one way or the other—

“Ah,” he says, like this fact just slipped his mind. Like he’s fine with seeing them here, and is totally and completely capable of carrying out his mission under these unexpected circumstances.

He is, of course. He can do anything.

“Why don’t you join us for a bit?” Luther offers politely, somehow managing to sound like he’s not entirely opposed to the idea. “Allison is actually just finishing up baking a pie—“

“No thank you,” Five cuts him off, stiff as a board and a little mad about it. A little voice in his head, which sounds suspiciously like Dolores, whispers: _Why can’t you just say yes?_

He doesn’t know—he doesn’t always _have_ to know everything, in fact. But one thing he is sure of, one thing he feels in his very bones, is that in this case it would be _bad._

“Oh, but I’m already done!” a voice behind him exclaims—too close. He turns slowly, makes uneasy eye contact. There’s a pause, and something shifts in Allison’s expression—alarm bells suddenly go off in Five’s head, but he’s far too disoriented to do anything about it in time.

And then Allison—graceful, surefooted, dainty Allison—lets her toe catch in the tiled floor. Suddenly the pie—topped with fucking whipped cream and everything, like a fucking cartoon—is smeared all across his front. He runs his fingers through the mess numbly, cringing at the squishy texture between his fingers. If he shoved this far enough up her nose and down her throat, it would kill her.

So helpful, the information his brain provides.

She pulls up out of her lunge almost instantly, a carefully-crafted apologetic look plastered across her face. “Five, I am _so_ sorry—“ she says, reaching for him—but he steps coldly away, half in shock at her boldness, half in frustration over his complete inability to anticipate the enemy. He is getting _so_ soft—

“You did that on purpose.”

Behind him, the rest of their siblings are silent enough to hear a pin drop.

After just a second too long, Allison puts a hand to her chest—the picture-perfect image of shock. Apparently, since she rumored her way into every movie she ever starred in, she never felt the need to actually learn to fucking act. “Don’t be ridiculous—“

Oh, he cannot _believe_ this family.

“This is my last clean shirt.” Clean being, well, subjective. Still. He doesn’t know how they knew, but they clearly all knew. Klaus’s poker face isn’t worth shit, and Vanya’s not making eye contact.

Diego mutters something under his breath about doing laundry, and Five briefly considers ripping his throat out with his teeth. But he has a more pressing matter to attend to—namely, eviscerating Allison. He takes a step toward her, and there’s a godawful screech of metal on tile behind him as Luther shoves the table back across the floor and stands. Klaus twitches nervously, and Allison’s fingers reach unconsciously for the scar around her throat. He watches their eyes meet somewhere over his head.

Like he’s a little kid.

Like they’re terrified of him.

He can’t quite decide which is worse.

“I hate you all,” he whispers hoarsely, desperate to hide the tremble he’s terrified will appear in his voice. “So, so much.” But he pulls his foot back and forces his trembling fists down to his sides, and slowly they relax and things return to normal.

Well shit, as long as _they’re_ comfortable here—

“Look, Five,” Luther says, but Five silences him with a look.

“I am going to go clean up,” he says, voice icy enough to freeze an entire ocean. He doesn’t particularly care that they know what he’s doing, but it is imperative that they leave him the fuck alone to do it. “Do _not_ follow me.”

He turns just as Vanya clears her throat. “Five, we’re not—“ But Allison cuts her off, and Vanya droops, letting her voice fade like she’d never spoken up in the first place.

“You know, we were actually all just getting rid of some things,” Allison says almost cheerfully, grabbing a pile of clothes heaped on a chair and pressing it into his clean hand. This grates on his very last nerve. At her proximity, Five lashes out in a badly-choreographed jerk, knocking half the pile onto the floor. He flashes away with whatever’s left before anyone else can open their mouth.

His only regret is that his fist didn’t actually connect with anyone on the way out.

* * *

Vanya finds him curled on the floor of his room an undetermined amount of time later, draped in an oversized shirt that must have been Luther’s as it’s bigger than his entire body. She’s still lugging around that weird bag, and she hovers awkwardly in the doorway—at least she’s polite enough to see if she’s wanted before barging in.

“I’m not a child,” he tells her, instead of something relevant and paranoia-free, like _Come in!_ or, much more likely, _Go away!_ That’s all he’s been thinking—that they’re still convinced he’s some idiotic kid. It’s why they never listen. It’s why they don’t see. He can’t get the thought out of his head—that if they’d all stayed dead, because of some stupid error _he_ made that prevented them from taking him seriously when it mattered most—

“I know,” she says softly. But apparently even she is done waiting for invitations that clearly won’t ever come, because she carefully steps around him and collapses lightly under his window.

For a moment he’s worried. There’s broken glass over there somewhere. But owning up to a colossal temper tantrum doesn’t seem like it would do him any favors in this moment, and since she doesn’t make any unhappily-stabbed sounds that fill him with the urge to apologize, he remains quiet as she settles in beside him.

“So, Allison can be a lot,” she murmurs gently.

That’s the understatement of the year.

“Allison is projecting because of her miserable failures as a parent, and it’s not my fault it’s so badly misplaced it’s like comparing Luther to King fucking Kong,” he snarls. He may have been thinking about this, too. But Vanya doesn’t say anything, just hums, and he feels a hint of shame wash through him at the outburst—even though he’s pretty sure everything he said is 100 percent true.

He gets his breathing under control—he hadn’t even realized there was something going on there, not until he was almost choking—and then Vanya turns her face to look at him.

He wishes she would stop.

“You know, I think—despite all appearances to the contrary—she’s actually trying to help.”

Five snorts. “What is this, Good Cop, Bad Cop?” He twitches. “Try to trick the old man?”

“Or maybe we’re all just trying to help,” Vanya says softly.

He wants her to go far, far away. He wants her to stay here forever. “Well, maybe I don’t need help.” It occurs to him, distantly, that he’s basically lying through his teeth—but she’s polite enough not to say anything.

God, he loves Vanya.

She looks back at the ceiling, carefully. Her eyes skim his math, and he knows she doesn’t understand any of it. But that’s not why she’s here. “So, that’s quite a look you’ve got going on there,” she murmurs, and he can tell she’s trying not to smile. It’s not funny, but suddenly the corners of his mouth are turning up too. If it weren’t for the mortifying tears still lingering in his eyes, everything about this little moment would be just fine.

“I think everything in that pile was Luther’s—I look like a Victorian ghost in a nightgown. I’m never leaving this room again.”

Again, Vanya stifles a giggle.

“Did everything you wore in the apocalypse fit?” she asks casually.

How is she so good at this? She just opens her mouth, and words that don’t fill him with rage come out. He’s never met anyone else who could do that. “No,” he admits.

“And how was that?”

“Irrelevant.” He can’t bring himself to say it—he doesn’t know if he even wants to—but the only thing that ever mattered in the apocalypse was finding a way back here. If clothes kept the dust out of his eyes and other assorted crevices, they were fine. If food kept him moving, it would do.

So maybe a little part of him was looking forward to the day it didn’t have to be like that anymore. Maybe that part is heartbroken, railing at him from the inside, over the fact that he’s failing to create such a future now. But that doesn’t matter, because he’s crushed parts like that before. It’s all just—irrelevant.

Vanya sighs, shifts a little. For a moment, he forgot she was there. “You know,” she says, studying him out of the corner of her eye, “you and I are basically the same size right now.”

“That’s not necessarily the exciting little tidbit of information you think it is,” he grumbles, but she just rolls her eyes and nudges her bag toward him.

“Take a look,” she says. So he sits up, and he does.

It’s—it’s not actually all awful. Vanya definitely dresses the most sensibly out of all of them—himself included, when you consider he’s been traipsing around in a 17-year-old school uniform designed by their father who hated them. There are some old button-downs that look like they’ll fit right at the shoulders, and soft pants that look baggy enough to be comfortable, but not so big that there’s a danger he’ll disappear. He even finds a few sweaters he’ll be able to layer—he’s missed wrapping himself up in heaping piles of soft clothing like he used to during the long, dark winters he spent alone.

“Acceptable,” he admits, begrudgingly.

“Hmm,” Vanya agrees, but with this tone—like she’s retroactively applying his statement to a hell of a lot more than he meant it to cover. The _clothes_ are fine. Everything else is … well—

“Look, it’s not a big deal—any of it,” he says haltingly. “I _know_ that. I just—“

_Just_ what? Just can’t stop making mistakes? Can’t convince himself that that next one won’t bring about the very things he’s worked so hard to stop from ever happening in the first place? Just doesn’t remember how to _do_ this, with people and feelings and prickly, overwhelming fear?

Vanya smiles gently at him. “Honestly? I think you just need to sleep.”

Oh, sure. But really, what does Vanya know about survival—or standing up for yourself—or enduring under terrible circumstances for decade upon decade? Nothing—absolutely nothing. So he’s pretty sure the sheer magnitude of difference between them renders any advice she might offer completely immaterial in the end.

“I’ll take it under advisement,” he says tightly, hugging the new clothes to his chest. She shrugs, like that’s good enough for her.

Later, if he catches a glimpse of his profile in one of her shirts and feels more like himself in that moment than the entire time he’s worn a child’s superhero costume—if there’s a pile of freshly-washed uniforms folded outside his door the next day, like some thoughtful apology he definitely won’t accept, nope, not at all—well, you lose some and you win some, and that’s just a fact of life.

Not to be conceited, but he thinks maybe he was long overdue for a win.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Gentle readers can have a little John Mulaney reference, as a treat.


	4. Interlude The Second

They mount Allison’s tablet on the wall in the hallway outside the kitchen, where the rest of them will pass it daily and Five will never see it—both because he hates family bonding moments like mealtimes, and because he doesn’t use doorways. They find, completely by accident, that they can actually gather there _while he’s in the kitchen_ and not attract his attention. It’s a sad fact of the times: if he sees them all assembled now, he pretends he can’t hear them, and peaces out as soon as he does whatever it is he’s come to do.

It makes Allison feel just the tiniest bit guilty, but she can’t deny that it’s effective for strategizing, at least.

“Well, I’d say Phase One was a big success,” Klaus whispers as they watch Five idly sniff a mug by the sink, clad in a fuzzy green sweater that looks _so_ much more comfortable—and clean—than anything they’ve seen him in yet.

Allison snorts softly. Easy for him to say—he chickened out and didn’t have to literally risk his life to get the deed done. She just hopes it was worth it.

Five rubs at his eye with the sleeve of the sweater, his hand completely concealed inside the fabric, and her heart softens a little. It probably was worth it, in the end. All in all, she was happy to take this one for the team.

“So what’s next?” Allison asks. She has a few suggestions, but she wants to see if anybody else came prepared. She feels a little like a schoolteacher, in that way—not that she has any firsthand experience there.

“I’ve got one, actually,” Diego says. Allison raises an eyebrow.

“Oh, so you’re helping now?” she asks. He scrunches up his face at her.

“I just think it’s time to address the elephant in the room,” he says. He pauses to side-eye Luther, because he’s a little shit. Then he continues: “We really need to be able to get close to him, or poke him on the arm or something, without endangering our lives.”

“Or smear a pie down his front,” Klaus chuckles, just a little too loudly for present company, and Allison stomps down on his foot— _hard_.

“Ouch!” he yelps, but she just shrugs.

“It’s a dangerous world out there,” she says. “You should really wear shoes.”

She’s sure she’s imagining it, but over in the kitchen, she’d almost swear Five smirks. She holds up a hand until Five blinks away, predictably holding only coffee and no food, just in case.

When he’s gone Diego reaches out for her Sharpie, making grabby motions with his hands, but Allison ignores him—only she gets to write on the list. He shoots her another dirty look, but continues empty handed.

“Here’s my current plan.” Diego pauses dramatically. Luther is picking idly at the wallpaper in the corner, presumably still miffed about the elephant comment, so Diego snaps his fingers right in front of his face until he looks up. “There are more of us than there are of him. We’ve just got to gang up, and he won’t have a chance.”

Allison raises the same eyebrow, higher this time. “Your plan to make him more comfortable with touch is to touch him more? All at once?”

“Like desensitizing him,” Vanya says thoughtfully. “If we don’t give him a choice, he should get used to it eventually—hell, my therapist actually suggested I try that, a while back.” She smiles wryly. “Apparently it’s not great to ignore your issues and pretend they’ll just go away.”

“And how did that work for you?” Klaus asks conversationally.

Vanya chews at her lip. “Interestingly, I guess. I sort of blew up the moon.” She blinks cautiously up at the rest of them, as if she’s not sure whether she’s allowed to joke about this subject yet. To be honest, Allison isn’t sure either.

Diego shifts his weight. “I’m not saying there’s not room for improvement, okay? I just think we’re at that point. Sometimes I get a little too close and I can _feel_ him imagining what I’d look like with a fireplace poker, or at least a really big fork, embedded in my skull.”

“He wouldn’t do that,” Vanya says immediately.

“Not to you,” Allison mumbles. Luther points at her in agreement.

“What she said.”

Vanya makes a face.

“For better or for worse—I would kinda like to give him a hug,” Klaus sighs. “Preferably for better. And preferably ending with all my limbs still attached.”

Luther nods, and even Vanya can’t argue with that. Diego rolls his eyes but doesn’t say anything. And so Allison writes it in and makes it official: **#2: DESENSITIZE TO TOUCH**


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So this turned out less about just touch and more a very very long exploration of Five and Diego’s relationship. Whoops.
> 
> Also I’m using a new keyboard—I think I caught all the bizarre typos, but if I missed any, that’s why.

He used to watch from the sidelines as they all touched each other as children.

Admittedly, none of them were ever terribly big on extravagant displays of affection. Some of them squeezed too hard, some of them had unbearably cold hands, and some of them had a portal containing bloodthirsty eldritch monsters in the middle of their chests—not naming names—which tended to leave a person a bit too unsettled for casual piggyback rides and late-night cuddles after a fight. And yet, Diego would run his hands through Allison’s curls, twisting them into pretty loops and braids to keep it all out of her face during training. Vanya would slip her hand around Klaus’s waist and pull him close as Reginald loomed. Luther would clap Ben on the shoulder, and smile when Ben reached up to boop his nose in return.

He’d clung to the memory of those little moments, alone in the wasteland. He wondered why he’d never initiated, participated, appreciated the opportunity when it was there. (He’d always thought he was so much _better_ —the cruel irony is that it left him far, far worse off in the end.)

He promised himself over and over again that when he got back— _when_ , not _if_ —things would be different.

And then they weren’t.

He thought about it a bit early on, absolutely more than he should have when he so obviously needed all of his brainpower to divert the literal end of the world. When he fell through the portal, disoriented and overwhelmed and suddenly much smaller than he should have been. When they sat across the table from him and stared, judged, acted like they didn’t miss him at all. When he almost bled out on the floor, when he lost them again and had to scramble desperately to get them back, each time he’d watch their hands and think, _would they, could they be reaching for me?_

He feels so idiotic about those moments now.

Today it’s like a bizarre sense of déjà vu as they relearn old habits. Allison runs a hand down Luther’s arm, links her pinky with Vanya’s as they do something monotonous like getting the mail or running out for bread. Klaus throws himself on Diego’s back at inopportune, borderline-dangerous moments, burrows under Luther’s arm on the couch just before they all break off for bed. As for him, he can count on one hand the times they’ve touched him in the month since their big reunion—Vanya cleaned the cut on his arm, Luther held him once when he vomited and wiped down his forehead as he unraveled into psychosis, they all linked hands before they went back in time, Klaus punched him in the face. Hell, the person who’s laid hands on him the most in this body—in any body, maybe—is probably the Handler, and he’s perfectly happy not thinking about her ever again, thank you very much.

It’s fine. He can focus on the saving them thing, this way, and leave the soft uselessness and general wasting of time to them.

He comes up with little excuses, here and there, because he can’t quite help himself. He leaves his mug for Diego to pick up in a cleaning frenzy, then snatches it from his hand, letting their fingers brush. He decides he absolutely needs to get to his room _right now_ when they’re all gathered in the hallway trying to decide on a movie, shoving his way past Allison’s arm, between Luther’s soft waving hands. He jumps too close and startles Klaus, lets him steady himself on his shoulder. He deliberately musses his collar, waits until Vanya notices and then gives her grudging permission—an eye roll, a snort—to smooth it out.

(Even that catches him off guard him. Even that makes his skin crawl. Their fingertips are both warmer and dryer than he expects, their eyes _look_ at him and see him and widen and narrow and move, and he wants to crawl out of his body, crawl out of his mind, forget forget _forget_.)

Regardless, sooner or later, they’re going to have to take initiative themselves. He won’t know if he can handle it, won’t know if he even _wants_ it, until they do. And as they days go by and they don’t and don’t and don’t, he realizes all over again that, actually, they simply just don’t feel the need. Because he’s an asshole, and they already have each other.

(Because he’s a killer.)

(Because they barely even know him.)

(Because they’re slowly, purposefully forgetting the end of the world, and tragedy still trails him like the ratty hem of a worn coat.)

Sometimes, even though nothing is the same, it turns out nothing really changes, either.

He withdraws. They come after him—with plates and platitudes and weaponized pies. He withdraws again.

This time, so do they.

* * *

The math isn’t working.

The problem is that he doesn’t know what it’s supposed to look like, exactly. He’s used to conceptualizing time as a sort of map and moving from place to already-formed place—not grasping a ball of malleable possibility in his hands and molding it like clay. It’s a little like building a space ship and then realizing you needed a submarine—overwhelming pressure where there shouldn’t be any, extra twitchy bits lurking where there you expect nothing but vacuum. There are either too many variables, or not enough.

He throws in a q. It doesn’t help. Nothing fucking helps.

And here, he’s supposed to know everything.

He tries to block out everything but the equations, but his obnoxious siblings’ voices travel even in this big old place, and everything they shout through the house makes it harder and harder to concentrate. Allison keeps arguing with her ex-husband, who Five doesn’t know and can’t account for, and who might have weapons or lead to other assorted bad ideas. Diego has a police scanner and is apparently intercepting robberies, the perpetrators of which _definitely_ have weapons—making that a full-blown bad idea in already action. Klaus is acting weird, which could mean drugs, which could mean overdosing. Luther and Vanya are quieter, but that still makes him nervous—he’s read a fair few books about mental health, and he knows the fact that they’re withdrawn, and self deprecating, and have few friends, is not exactly the most reassuring sign.

There just isn’t enough time. And they all won’t stop _talking._

He can hear them now, though he hasn’t actually seen them in ages. Allison is in the bathroom clattering around in the cabinets, repeating some weird rhyme to herself, interspersed with tongue clicking and disturbingly wet-sounding raspberries. Vanya is playing something on the violin, which wouldn’t be _so_ bad, if it wasn’t in a key that clashed horribly with whatever garbage Luther has blasting from the record player in his room.

He wants them to shut up. He wonders if they’re all doing okay. They’ve stopped bringing him food now—and he doesn’t know what that means, that he’s noticed. Maybe he’s hungry?

(That’s definitely not it. He ate … yesterday-ish. Bread and an onion, two whole food groups. And he’s got half a cup of coffee right here at his elbow.)

He almost knocks the coffee over when he hears Diego’s sudden shout from down the hall: “What’s it saying?”

There’s faint static in the background—the infamous police scanner, presumably—and Klaus reports what crackles from the speaker. “Convenience store on Mulberry. Request for immediate backup. Armed robbers—I think four? Hmm, they should really enunciate…” He trails off, then speaks again at Diego’s pointed cough. “Anyway, I think it actually is Patch this time.”

“Four. Piece of cake,” Diego’s voice says, much closer to Five’s door now. He’s on his way out. “Okay, I’ll be back. I’ll swing by for more milk on the way home.”

“Can you get milk from a real cow instead of milk from a plant, pretty please?” Klaus requests mournfully. Diego ignores him (which is a no).

“Mulberry!” he exclaims instead as he heads down the stairs, practically gleeful. His completely inappropriate tone implies that what he’s actually envisioning right now is a daring reunion with his detective, not the armed gunmen as good as waiting for him.

And, well, that sounds fairly dangerous. Also stupid—definitely stupid. As the resident Adult of this ridiculous circus, Five has no choice but to set his marker down (current color: sky blue) and step in.

“Patch isn’t going to fall in love with you just because you get yourself killed for her,” he snaps when he appears next to Diego down in the entryway. Diego doesn’t _scream_ , exactly, but he definitely yelps. “Even if, for some unfathomable reason, the reverse temporarily had that effect on you.”

It’s not a particularly elegant greeting, or a particularly kind one considering the way their last escapade with Past Patch went down—not to mention everything that’s happened since. But he decided on the way down to cut right to the chase. He’s economical like that.

Diego recovers himself, then rolls his eyes. “You’re a little freak. You know that, right?”

“She doesn’t even know who you are,” Five says—though he’s not actually sure about that, because the timeline is currently a veritable disaster. That’s not the point, though. Diego grits his teeth—Five can see the exact moment that he decides to stop pretending to ignore the bait.

“She will. Even if she doesn’t now.”

“But should she?”

He can tell Diego wants to say yes—it’s on the very tip of his tongue. But something stops him.

Five knows the feeling well.

“I’m not going to get killed,” he says instead, changing the subject. Five’s other point has sunk in by now, and he looks a little offended. “I’ve been doing this as long as I can remember. Do you really have such little faith in my abilities?”

“Yes!” Five says immediately. “I have extremely little faith in your abilities.” That’s basically a lie—Diego is fairly competent in many ways considering what he is, even with his undeniable lack of intelligence, and there are few other people Five would choose to have his back if they were in a situation that truly called for a fight. But there are times when it’s better to lie than risk the unknown. He doesn’t understand why no one seems to grasp the overwhelming need to keep everyone as safe as possible, now that the stakes aren’t literally the destruction of life on the planet.

Now that there’s a real future for them all, it has to be a long, healthy one. It’s not enough for it to exist—it has to be _good._ They’ve risked everything for this. It’s all he’s ever wanted.

“Patch is better off without you,” he adds when it’s clear other approaches aren’t going to work. That is perhaps the most unkind thing he’s said, but it’s undoubtedly true. The whole world is always better off until they come along. Inexplicably, it’s only Five himself who seems to lose it without his siblings around.

Diego holds himself on edge now, like he’s gearing up for some kind of fight, but Five simply moves his own body in front of the door. He might not know everything there is to know, but he knows this—if he doesn’t let Diego past, then he’s not getting past. There’s no question about that.

Diego knows this too. He sneers at him, basically helpless.

But not entirely.

“Oh, grow up, Five,” he says with a cruel twist of his mouth. It’s funny—even when Five left him in the mental institution, or dragged him to Dad, he was never on the receiving end of a look like that. He tells himself it doesn’t matter, but he doesn’t like it at all.

He likes this even less: as Diego opens his mouth to go on, he brings a finger up to poke Five’s chest. “Not everything is the end of the fucking world.”

And, okay. Nope.

There’s probably a clever retort to that, but all Five hears is white noise. So he punches him right in the nose instead.

There’s a crack so loud it sends Luther and Allison running from somewhere across the house, and Diego is hunched over dripping blood on the carpet when they slide into the doorway. Five stands stock still, lest they all be intimidated by him again, and he doesn’t even realize he’s shaking until he feels Allison’s hand wrap around his wrist.

“What did you do?” she demands, but she’s not talking to him, she’s talking to Diego. Overwhelmed, Five wrenches his arm away as Diego glowers.

“I can fight my own fucking battles, Allison,” he mutters, ignoring her hurt look and Diego’s angry, bloody snort.

“He was being a little bitch, telling me what I can and can’t do—just like Dad,” Diego snarls. Allison raises an eyebrow at him, but doesn’t respond—because Five doesn’t want her to, maybe. He did make that perfectly clear. Diego scrubs a hand under his nose; it barely interrupts the flow. “We just got rid of that man—we _don’t_ need a new one.”

Five tastes blood of his own, and he slowly releases his lip from between his teeth.

“As if he’s done any better with us than Dad ever did,” Diego finishes.

Inexplicably, Allison reaches for Five again, and he swats her away—his hand connects with her arm, and she jerks back. For a second there’s this tangible fear that he can see in her eyes— _why did he do that, why did he do that_. But she shakes it off, and his clenched fists return to his sides, and they all move on.

Luther squints at Five. “He called you Dad? That’s why you hit him?” He looks confused—perhaps he’s recalling how Five had, most embarrassingly, called himself “daddy” not that long ago.

“Sure,” Five grunts. It’s not like he can articulate what actually got to him anyway. He can barely even piece it together himself. “Let’s go with that.”

Diego glances down at the ground, and for a second, it’s almost like he feels guilty or something. Five figures he’s just casting around for some kind of weapon to reciprocate with, like a stick.

Luther looks like he’s torn between politely requesting that Five not do that again—veering dangerously into general parent-emulating territory himself—and smacking Diego too, which even Five can admit would be kind of mean since he’s already bleeding all over.

“Maybe we all just try to get along,” he says meekly instead, which makes Diego spit some blood in his direction and Five roll his eyes and blink to a spot halfway up the stairs, where they could only see him if they looked really, really closely.

Still, instead of heading for the street, Diego stomps off toward the kitchen. There’s no way he’s going to confront Patch for the first time with a waterfall of drying blood smeared down his chin. Five hadn’t really known for sure that his brother was quite so shallow, but the hair and the diet and the frankly obsessive workout routine had sort of clued him in to the possibility.

Mission accomplished, then. Even if it wasn’t terribly elegant.

Five doesn’t have time to be elegant. Not now.

* * *

But of course, nothing is ever actually that easy.

“ _What_ do you think you’re doing?”

Diego sits on a park bench that’s conveniently right outside the alleged drug den currently being investigated by Patch’s precinct. There’s a dark circle under each of his eyes and a piece of toilet paper shoved up his left nostril. He grins shamelessly, completely unfazed at being caught less than 24 hours after their argument.

“Enjoying the day.” He pats the bench beside him condescendingly, entirely unbothered, as Five fumes.

“What part of _no_ was too complicated for your thick empty head to understand?”

“The part where a pipsqueak half my size was telling me what to do,” Diego smirks, rolling his shoulders back and kicking out his legs in front of him. “Here’s some free leadership advice, while we’re at it—if you want people to respect your calls, don’t fucking maim them.”

“I didn’t _maim_ you,” Five mutters. If he’d really let loose on Diego, he wouldn’t have been able to make his way here at all.

On second thought, maybe he should have maimed him. He’ll remember that, next time.

“You need to loosen up a little, man,” Diego continues—still perfectly amicable, but looking across the street now. There’s an unmarked car outside the building, and a few regular squad cars a safe distance down the block, but other than that nothing seems amiss. “You’re too young for such high blood pressure.”

He’s teasing. He’s obviously teasing—maybe he’s even letting Five know that he’s not still angry. Sometimes people say one thing and mean something almost unrecognizably different. But Five doesn’t think it’s particularly funny, and he stands there and glowers.

Diego reaches out slowly and grabs the corner of Five’s blazer, tugs until he’s backed him into the bench at his side. He gives in and sits, because if Diego’s going to stay here then he might as well stick around and make sure nothing catastrophic happens. He’s at the end of his rope—all it’s gonna take is one more catastrophe.

“I promise not to do anything stupid,” Diego says. “No assassin assassinations. No taking on entire armies. Feel better now?”

“Not particularly,” Five replies. He suspects that his definition of stupid is _very_ different from Diego’s. Still, it’s better than nothing.

He hasn’t actually been outside since they got back, not for more than a few minutes to scavenge up some supplies, and he takes a moment to look around. Spring is in full swing by now, and there’s green popping up in places he never even imagined (remembered?) green could be. There are people walking slowly all around them—not threatening him, not running from something, not endangering the timeline, just going about their ordinary lives. A breeze stirs his hair, and it smells, not of ash or ozone or decay, but of something flowery and a taco cart down the sidewalk.

That doesn’t smell half bad. He wonders distantly, ignoring his twisting stomach, if he would actually like tacos.

Eventually Diego shifts a little, like he’s trying to get his attention. “You don’t even want me to go over and say hello,” he says after a moment of weird twitching.

It’s not a question, but he also doesn’t sound mad. Five takes a moment to really appreciate the effort that he must be exercising here. Diego has always been a short fuse, and he doesn’t like the word _no_.

“There are still so many things we don’t know,” he says slowly, like he’s talking to a toddler. There’s clearly been a communication breakdown somewhere along this line of information, and he wants to make sure it’s cleared up now rather than later. “You can’t be sure what effects a meeting like this could have—for you _or_ for her.”

To be honest, this is barely even a concern to him at this point. Without the Commission the way he remembers it the rules are essentially up in the air, and since the world was supposed to end a few weeks ago, current events are more or less the Wild West. But it’s also the best argument he has. And he _doesn’t_ know for sure, so it’s better to be safe than sorry.

He’s seen it before—some poor schmuck who thinks he’s fixing the timeline makes a plan, and then wakes up the next morning with a bullet in his head himself. Just because Herb looks like someone you’d grab a drink with at a bar (rather than, for example, a vampire trying to steal a sip from the veins in your throat) doesn’t mean he’s not capable of gritting his teeth and doing the hard part of the job just like anybody else.

Diego is unfazed. “Well I’m telling you, my instincts are great, and they’re saying there’s nothing to be afraid of.”

His voice is louder now, almost like he’s gearing up for another argument. Five is more than happy to oblige. After all, Diego got himself framed for murder, locked up in the loony bin, stabbed by their own father less than fifteen minutes into a mission, kidnapped by a woman half his size and with only a fraction of his skill—his instincts are, frankly, shit.

“Well, what about Lila?” Five demands. He’s toeing a delicate line here, he knows, but damn if he isn’t toeing it hard. “Clearly your instincts aren’t as good as you think they are. And now that you mention it, what about the last time you got involved in one of Patch’s cases—“

“Don’t talk about Lila.” Diego’s face hardens. “You don’t know—“

“Don’t know what? That this is a rebound of a rebound?”

For a moment, he’s sure Diego is going to slap him. But sometimes his brother is a little smarter than he gives him credit for.

“Listen to me, Five,” Diego says, voice low and serious. “You don’t know anything about love. You had the plastic equivalent of a baby blanket for 45 years. So shut up about things you don’t understand.”

His tone isn’t exactly cruel—not overtly so, anyway—but it sends shards of ice through Five’s chest anyway. “Don’t talk about Dolores,” he snaps, echoing Diego’s earlier complaint.

“Dolores is a mannequin. We’re talking about people, here. That’s the point.”

Well, doesn’t he just have it all figured out.

On some level Dolores _is_ a mannequin, obviously—can’t fault Diego for that astute observation. But she’s also the fossilized silver lining from an unending waking nightmare, a flashbulb memory of an entire life Diego knows next to nothing about. There are shreds of sanity ground into her very glaze, the blackest despair clinging to her tattered clothes. Dolores is everything and nothing at the same time, and Five could spend another fifty years trying to unravel what she represents and still not work it all out.

She’s also _gone_ —deliberately, if that means anything—and not something Diego is qualified to psychoanalyze, _ever._

“You know what, Diego, you’re right,” he laughs bitterly, locking all of that safely up in his chest so it can’t be used against him too. “I should’ve gone with my other choices for companionship—corpses and pedophiles.”

Diego makes a face. “What about at the Commission?”

Nope. Not good.

Five feels himself snap again, and doesn’t even try to rein the hostility in. “Here’s a fact for you, idiot: you don’t know _shit_ about the Commission.”

Diego’s expression grows into a grin; there’s something feral about it now. “Oh yeah? Well—“

Five has to clench his fists around the seat of the bench to stop himself from literally slapping a hand over Diego’s mouth. “I swear, if you mention the Infinite fucking Switchboard one more goddamn time—“

For a minute there’s more blood in their future—maybe a lot of it, who knows. It’s _so_ much to ask that Five keep stamping down on that impulse to just rip him to pieces. But then Diego snorts out a laugh, toilet paper fluttering grossly in his nostril, and some of the tension miraculously deflates.

“Why the hell are you so mad at me, bro?” he asks, shaking his head.

_Push it down_ , Five tells himself. _Push it all down._

“I didn’t want you to go to the Commission,” he says after a deep breath, because he’s an adult who can use his words to express things.

“What, feeling territorial? Only you’re good enough for them?” Diego chuckles dully. “I feel like we’ve had this argument before.”

“It’s not—look, you’re _too_ good for them,” Five says. He’s been feeling some things about this for a while, and he figures he might as well try to put it into a coherent thought so they can both get over it. “It’s a horrible place, where they do horrible things, and all you’ve ever done is try to protect people.” He almost gags on his next thought. “ _I_ just want to protect _you._ ” Like nobody ever protected him.

“That’s not your responsibility,” Diego tells him immediately, with a confidence Five envies.

“They would never have found you if it wasn’t for me. They wouldn’t have taken you. It was absolutely my responsibility.” Five knows this as much as he’s ever known anything.

“And now?”

Maybe it’s the fact that he keeps dumping them unfamiliar places and leaving them to face the consequences. Maybe it’s an “older” brother thing. Maybe it’s the horrible, swirling fear that just won’t go away. But at the end of the day, Five doesn’t really have a specific answer to that one. He didn’t choose this life—he’s just living it.

Diego is grinning again, smugly this time, but Five is spared his gloating and subsequent rejection of any reasonable caution by a commotion across the street. First Patch tears out of the building, bulletproof vest badly concealed under a sweater, shouting something to her partner in the car and gesturing behind her. Then there’s a small man in a giant coat, who runs immediately to the curb. Finally, behind them, emerges a woman with a frankly rude number of handguns.

Diego sits up straight on the bench, and he actually turns to look for permission, but Five is already gone. By the time Diego has sprinted across the street, the woman is unconscious and the guns are gone. Patch looks unfazed—maybe she _does_ know the Umbrella Academy, or at least their counterparts. Diego, breathing hard, seems vaguely put-out.

Then the small man drops his coat, and clutched to his chest is a bomb.

“Five—“ Diego shouts, but he’s already seen it—he’s clenching his fists but nothing is happening, _how_ is he running on empty already—

A hand closes around his collar, and Diego literally hefts him into the air and throws him over a hedge. A second later he can’t breathe, because Diego lands directly on top of him, one leg on either side of his hips, torso pressing him down.

“Stay down— _stay down_ ,” Diego hisses, clutching Five tighter to his chest. The explosion is smaller than he’d expected—the ground barely even rocks, and only a few car alarms nearby go off. When Five twists around to get a good look under the shrub, he sees the bomber on the ground with Patch’s firm hand on his back—he almost smiles, because he and Diego are practically mirroring them.

“You’re right, Diego,” he wheezes smugly, despite the fact that he’s half suffocated and on some sort of disorienting adrenaline high. “Your instincts are infallible.”

Diego doesn’t take the bait, though. He drops his forehead to rest on the back of Five’s neck, little breaths of hot air sending goosebumps down his spine. “See, you little shit?” he murmurs, as if he didn’t hear Five at all. Five can barely focus on the words. “Despite your best efforts, sometimes you need _us_ to protect _you._ ”

Down the street, Patch hauls the bomber to his feet and stuffs him roughly in the backseat of a cruiser. Her partner peers down into the storm cellar, where Patch had chucked the bomb at the last minute. Diego sits up, pulling Five with him. But instead of brushing himself off and going to help the police, Diego remains crouched with Five clutched against his chest.

His grip is tight, and Five is half on his lap at this point—he hates it, _hates_ it. He also realizes the breaths in his ear are shaky.

“I’m fine,” he says, trying to reassure Diego and squirm away at the same time. There’s this weird thing happening where his abdomen is literally burning in the place Diego’s arm encircles it, nerves on fire, screaming for relief. He can feel his brother’s heartbeat against his back, and it’s the only thing keeping him sane. Diego’s skin is clammy, and it sticks to him.

But instead of letting him go, Diego’s arms tighten more. “Yeah? Well maybe I’m not.”

Five’s blood runs cold, and he tries to twist around. “You’re hurt?” _Cold. Clammy. Dead._

“No,” Diego snorts. “But you scared me.”

_Oh._

“I would’ve been fine,” Five says once he processes that. It’s not like he hasn’t outrun a bomb before. “Honestly, I’m surprised you didn’t run to save Patch.” He can picture it so vividly he can’t quite believe it didn’t happen—Diego taking a flying leap, gathering Patch in his arms, making it down the block and around the corner before anything exploded. Maybe he’d direct the shrapnel up into the sky like fireworks. Maybe Patch would hug him after—either way, Five wouldn’t be stuck here like this.

“She doesn’t know me,” Diego says simply. And that’s that.

After a brief pause Five wraps his fingers delicately around Diego’s hand and pulls with all his strength, because that was sweet and all, but he’s really solidly uncomfortable. If he was bigger, if he was _right_ , that would be all it takes—but now, on it’s own, it’s not enough. “ _Please_ get off me,” he says. He’s practically begging, and he can feel Diego’s smug smile; his breathing is back to normal. While Five gets more agitated, he’s completely calmed down.

“Not yet. I want Allison to owe me money.”

At this point he’s spent a lot of time envisioning different ways he could take Diego down over the past few hours. They all rush back to him now. He’s fully prepared to give his nose another good whack, or maybe go for his eyes with sharp fingers, but all it takes is a few well-placed elbow jabs before Diego throws up his arms and surrenders.

“Jesus.”

“I gotta say, whatever weird bet you’ve all got about me is getting old,“ Five says once he’s moved several feet away to safety and straightened his clothes. He feels weirdly drained, like he just ran a marathon or spent several hours throwing up.

Diego shakes his head and clambers to his feet. “It’s not a bet. More like a public service.”

“I have no idea what that means.”

“Good.”

Five hates him.

* * *

He has the scent of smoke from the bomb lingering among the strands of his hair, and it smells like home, leeches the feeling from his fingertips and toes. If he closes his eyes, he might as well be back in the apocalypse. The math he hasn’t solved yet eats at him from somewhere behind his ribcage, grating against the bone, setting his teeth on edge. Klaus stands in the doorway of the Academy puffing on something dark and plastic, and the sweet haze it gives off smells enough like a twinkie that he wants to vomit, can barely stop himself from gagging. His ears are even ringing a little, and the last time his ears were ringing, everyone was dead.

Despite all this, he lets Diego shove him down on the couch beside Vanya, watches him practically vibrate with excitement at the thought of telling their assembled siblings about his newest heroics, and doesn’t blink up to his room. He barely even rolls his eyes when Diego gets going about valiantly saving his very endangered life.

Jesus Christ, though. How boring are their lives now that _watching_ a bombing is somehow this exciting?

Five studies his hands as he lets his brother’s voice wash over him—there’s a bruise on his knuckles that he didn’t have yesterday morning, so his best guess is that he got it from Diego’s face. He drifts a little to the left, where Vanya sits next to him, and barely catches himself before he literally leans up against her. When he glances back up, Diego is mouthing something to Allison at the very edge of his sight: _I did it_ , or something to that effect. He has no idea what he means, though he’s sure it’s related to their bet about him. To his surprise, he finds he doesn’t actually care.

Diego gets bored eventually and finally wanders away. Luther trails after him, then Klaus and Vanya.

And then it’s just him and Allison left.

He tenses just a little on the couch—he should go up to his room and get back to work—but even though he hasn’t done very much, it _feels_ like it’s been a long day. This house is his just as much as it is theirs. He has every right to be here. He doesn’t have to flee.

Allison walks behind the bar and pours herself a very large drink. He watches her take a sip. He watches Klaus flit by the balcony upstairs. He glances at the empty space above the fireplace—he’d hated the portrait of himself smirking down at them all, but it’s weird now that the wall is just empty, too.

“Hey, do you know what being touch starved is?” Allison says suddenly, breaking the awkward silence between them. Five starts a little, but covers it well, he thinks. He’s colder now that Vanya’s left the spot next to him—apparently, just sitting near someone is enough to raise your body temperature a bit. Who knew?

_Does he know what being touch starved is?_ Jesus Christ. If Dolores were here, she’d dub him the fucking poster child.

“Obviously,” he says—snaps, too sharply. He’s always so sharp. “It’s literally in the name.”

Allison is strangely quiet. She stirs her drink, watching him subtly enough that he supposes he’s not meant to notice. By all rights he should still be upset with her—the last time he spent more than a moment in passing with her she was smearing dessert all over him, and it’s beyond reasonable doubt at this point that she’s openly daring their siblings to be as annoying toward him as possible. She’s after something, and he’s been trying to ignore it, because he has more important things to worry about. But she’s being quite restrained now, and honestly seems more than a little sad. Maybe she deserves some kind of punishment, but he’s not cruel enough to inflict an emotional one. They’ve all suffered enough because of him.

He lets her drain the glass and shred the napkin she’s got clenched in her fist, then decides he can’t take it anymore. “Is this about your daughter?”

“What?” She looks completely confused, and he wonders for a moment if he got it all wrong.

“Oh,” he says. “I just assumed—don’t people touch their kids?” Allison blinks at him, and he laughs darkly. “I mean, normal people,” he clarifies. He knows basically nothing about what kind of parent she is, outside of a few mentions in Vanya’s book and the handful of things she’s told them, but he’s always assumed she would aim for the furthest thing from their father that one could plausibly be.

Surely that involves the occasional hug or high five. And now she’s been without that for—months? Years?

God, and then there was her husband, too, wasn’t there? Five doesn’t remember much about that last night in 1963. He’d been bruised to holy hell and still spitting phantom blood out of his mouth, ears ringing from falling bricks and gunshots and constantly looking over his shoulder for another enemy, another trap. But he remembers his siblings asking for more time— _Allison_ asking for more time. He remembers saying no. And then, back home—she’d said, _Can you fix this for me_ , and he’d said no then too.

He always says no. Always. _Don’t you feel anything?_ a bitter shade of Dolores whispers in the back of his mind. (He’ll miss her until the day he dies, sure. But sometimes, she was nothing more than the very worst parts of himself.)

Allison’s mouth twists a little, like she’s catching up with the conversation, and then she’s nodding strangely energetically. Is he making her feel—better? Not that he’s complaining, but it’s certainly unexpected. He’d almost expected bringing it all up to make everything worse.

“I—yes,” she says. “Yes, you’re right. I think I’m just—missing her more than usual lately, I guess. She’s always on my mind.”

And damn, but if he doesn’t know what that’s like.

Five shifts uncomfortably. He’s about to do something that he is absolutely, 100 percent going to regret. But Allison’s eyes are big and dark and the spot where Vanya was sitting is cold and he can still feel Diego’s body over his on the grass. _But isn’t this what he wanted?_ that sharp voice in his head echoes.

_Isn’t this what you wanted?_

“You know I’m not a kid,” he says. He was aiming for a tone that’s mature and commanding, but it comes out almost a whisper.

Allison raises her hands defensively. He spares a moment to wonder if perhaps he’s gone a little overkill on hammering that point home, but— _Impossible._ “Oh, I know. Trust me, I know.”

He bites his lip. “But—I do look like one.” It’s as good as permission; in fact, he means it to be.

He’s never even seen a picture of Claire—he knows she’s younger than this body, but he doesn’t know whether her limbs are spindly like his, how her hair feels, whether she’s soft like Allison or more pointy. But maybe that doesn’t matter.

Allison is halfway across the room before she catches herself. There’s a fleeting glint in her eye that makes him think that something nefarious is once again afoot, but it’s not enough to make him jump away. “I don’t want to make you uncomfortable,” she says gently. She’s obviously not lying—if he asked, or even squirmed just a little too much, he knows she would leave him alone right now.

Instead, he shakes his head.

“I’m always uncomfortable,” he whispers, but he leans forward and lets her slide an arm behind his back and curl up at his side anyway.

It’s awkward and uncomfortable and nothing like he was expecting. He can’t quite force his shoulders to come down from somewhere near his ears, and he knows his bony elbow is digging into the soft swell of her ribs. Her breath is hot on his neck, which makes his collar itch, and the weight of her against him is making him shake a little. Maybe he’s hungry now. Maybe he’s just tired. There’s this weird buzzing in his head, stopping him from focusing completely. He thinks she might be crying.

It’s also okay. For a little while.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Maybe this is all over the place, or maybe touch, protection, and safety are all intertwined.
> 
> Also, it seemed natural somehow that Five would run around panicking about everybody dying when nothing bad is happening and then calm down when he’s almost blown up, idk.


End file.
